The Detectorists - Poignant and Sweet

 

At first I thought this was another British comedy about unlovely people of the post-modernist "life sucks and then you die" genre. Toby Jones, after all, plays a lot of unsavory characters. But pretty quickly I came to really like the two main characters -Mackenzie Crook (from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies) as Andy and Toby Jones (from Sherlock) as Lance. Neither is a pretty person. They play oddball friends scouring the English countryside for treasure with metal detectors. Diana Rigg (Mrs. Peel from the Avengers) also appears as Veroinica in this quirky little series which is fun. 

A friend recommended this series to me and I respect her opinion on things like this. The series won a BAFTA Award. The show follows a group of "detectorists", amateur archaeologists searching for and finding military buttons, Roman coins and odd bits of old appliances. The six episodes I watched took us through their search for a buried Roman treasure that the Jones character is convinced is somewhere in the field.

There are rivals for the search grounds and all sorts of problems come up that you'd not expect would plague a bunch of guys who spend their weekends running metal detectors up and down an open field. The story, like all good stories, lures you in softly and holds you to the end. I found it on Amazon's Britbox which I get with my Amazon Prime subscription (which with the free shipping and all the free movies and TV shows is well worth the annual bill). If you're looking for a gentle diversion for a Sunday afternoon, I recommend this funny little series.

Stars:  Mackenzie Crook, Toby Jones, Pearce Quigley, Diana Rigg

And I Thought Plan 9 From Outer Space was a Bad Movie

 

 Aronofsky's Noah Is Bad Religion, Bad Politics, and Bad Writing

After avoiding watching this 160 million dollar turkey for 7 years, out of curiosity, I finally watched it. It is very very very loosely based on the Biblical story of Noah. Did I say VERY loosely enough times? Probably not. Man! In this unwieldy beast of a picture, After Adam and Eve sin, God doesn't talk to anyone for a couple of thousand years, having himself a right royal sulk over the whole pulsating magical fruit eating thing. Also noteworthy, evidently in Eden, Adam and Eve, looked thin, sexless and glowing, kind of like the aliens in Cocoon with their fake skins off. Mankind has messed up (or I probably should say "personkind" given the whole thing leaned to the left like the flipping Tower of Pisa). In this showy epic, it seems that Cain's extended family, with the help of fallen angels that God has turned into rock monsters, build an industrial civilization that has cut down all the trees, filled all the ponds and creeks with toxic waste and spilled lots of oil on the ground - that and, of course, the bad guys are all bullies and Noah is a misogynist of sorts. 

Noah comes off as a cross between a really angry, very focused Terminator and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. This is a shameless save-the-planet propaganda film that could have been written to support a propaganda campaign for the Green New Deal. It hits all the latest causes - killing the planet, depopulation, fallen angels ain't so bad, magical families, bullies, sex, war, male misogyny and implied incest. I was surprised that Noah wasn't black and Ham, at least, wasn't gay. Of course, Aronofsky did get some flack from the "woke" folk for those oversights.

The writers turned the Bible account on its ear. The fallen angels were "just trying to help" according to the narrator and God got mad at them, but they all got forgiven and went back to heaven when they started mass murdering people trying to get on the ark when the rain fell. The ark had a stowaway and there was a fight scene and someone was killed. In the battle outside the ark, it seemed that the faster the rock monster fallen angels squashed the maniacal human army, the sooner they were forgiven, freed of their rock casing and sucked back up into heaven.

Methuselah (Anthony Hopkins) came off as a crazy magical wizard with an obsession for berries who defended the rock angels from attacks by the Cain family while dispensing cryptic advice. There was even a magical talisman the family passed around that was the skin of the serpent that someone retrieved from Eden. This snakeskin gave Noah's family and anyone who stole the skin, magical powers. Noah came off as one of those environmental extremists that think we should kill all humans to preserve the planet in some kind of pristine state because people were messing the place up. Noah thinks that God, in this version of the story, is perfectly okay with wiping out the human race. 

To do God's will, Noah plans for his family not to reproduce, but to die out after the flood and leave the place to the bunny rabbits and birds. To that end, he leaves Ham's girlfriend behind in the woods to be trampled to death by a mob (leaving Ham single and unable to reproduce). Emma Thompson is safely barren till meddling Methuselah works his healing spell on her unbeknownst to Noah. When Thompson miraculously bears twin girls during the voyage, Noah nearly kills both of the babies and afterwards moans that he had thus failed to carry out God's plan to utterly destroy the human race while preserving the aforementioned fuzzy bunnies, along with an assortment of snakes and elephants. If that ain't a UN Depopulation Initiative wet dream, I don't know what is. 

Paramount seemed shocked that the film lost money in the states and was banned in a lot of non-communist countries where Muslims, Jews and Christians lived. Paramount tried to recut the film two different ways from Aronofsky's original and tested all 3 with religious audiences (without telling Aronofsky). They couldn't get Christians to like any version of this thing. When Aronofsky found out about the test, he got mad at the studio for even thinking about messing around with his "vision".

I, quite frankly, am a Christian. I sat through it for educational purposes, mostly to write this review, and to give the film a chance to get at least one or two things right. It never did. It felt like sitting through Leni Riefenstahl's 1935 Hitler propaganda documentary, "Triumph of the Will" (which I did sit through in college strictly for educational purposes).

The film attempted to win what should have been its primary audience. This film came 10 years after the stunning box office income from Mel Gibson's "Passion of the Christ". Christians should have lapped up a film about one of the more special-effects worthy stories in the Bible. As it was, the movie had to make up the earnings shortfall outside the States in countries where nobody reads the Bible apparently.

I'm giving this one the full three raspberries because I'm offended for Moses, who was the original author of the Noah story. Aronofsky had no respect for his source material and treated a work of literature like it was Sharknado, sailing through trying to hit all the right politically correct issues. Somehow the harder they try to make the perfect progressive remake of a good old story the worse it turns out.  I'm usually pretty forgiving for movies. It's hard to make a movie and particularly to adapt a story. Somehow Aronofsky must have thought, "Well, the author is dead and nobody reads the book anymore, so I can do anything I want with it. I know! How about rock monsters and an insane cult leader who wants everyone on the planet......TO DIE!!!!!

Nope!

© 2021 by Tom King